There's a new blog on the block launching today in St. Louis. Meet Music of the Hour, a brand-spankin' new music website founded by Berrek Thompson and Justin Price. MOTH aims to be a fully interactive site to which anyone can contribute. They plan to cover music on the local, regional and national levels, and already boast contributors in California, Texas and the Northeast, as well as here in St. Louis.
"Our goal was never really to be limited to local coverage," says Price. "What we're doing trying to do is use Saint Louis as an example of what's possible with MOTH in our ability to cover what's happening. We hope that other people will follow us in doing that with their local scene and contribute it to our site. We want to be fully user-interactive, in that anyone who wants to contribute essays, interviews or album recommendations are welcome."
Both Thompson and Price are married and have day jobs -- Price is a chemist in radiochemisty, and Thompson works in web design -- so to say MOTH is a labor of love would be an understatement.
"We've been working on it for the past eight months, which has pretty much moved at snail's pace since we both are married and have to buy out time from our busy schedules to get it together," Price says. "A lot of the work that Berrek and I will do together is at fine food establishments in the St. Louis Metro area," he adds. "So, if you see two guys with a laptop and a yellow legal pad arguing about what 'dubstep' is exactly over a few beers, it's probably us."
So how did the concept for MOTH emerge?
"MOTH originated as an e-mail sent between our friend Fernando and I, we would talk about what we were listening to at work, being that we both had the possibility to listen to music on the job," Price says. "As time went on, that e-mail eventually included over ten people. Berrek and I thought that it was a vital idea that we could expound on: getting album/band recommendations directly from peers, which was something that we weren't really seeing in social media directly. We both also agreed that some of the best music recommendations that we've ever received were from friends, so we thought that expanding that idea could be pretty powerful."
Five Questions: 1. What was the impetus behind starting Music of the Hour? JP: "Berrek and I both have playing/writing music as passion that we've both put aside over the last couple of years. It seems like as a young person, if you want to do something in music you almost have to invest in that when you're like eighteen or nineteen years old, and we didn't take that route. When you hear the term "settle down" it can almost seem to carry the idea that you have to cut some of your passions, but in our case we are more into music than we've ever been.
Some of the people who were included initially on that original e-mail were people who were a bit older, married and sometimes with kids. They used to have more time to devote to music, and even though there was no love lost, that time has just escaped them. The Internet, and that communication with their peers, became a lifeline for them to find out what has happening in music. When you think about it, there are millions of people who are on Facebook (or the Internet in general) all day, but they aren't spending their time digging into music like Berrek and I. I've always been that friend who is always talking about what bands I've found lately, and what records they need to check out. So we created a forum for people to talk strictly about music with their friends in that fashion, but also find a way to contribute to the coverage of local, independent music in various communities.
